Few commercials have been as memorable as the ‘crying Indian’ from the seventies, and I reckon few commercials have had more impact on people’s behavior. The crying Indian left quite a mark on American popular culture.

I was a kid when I first saw that image, and I distinctly recall the sense of shame I felt upon watching it. It wasn’t just that I’d seen people littering like that, I’d done it myself. In fact, littering was pretty damned common back in those days, hence the commercial! I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest the image of that crying Indian moved a lot of people to rethink their behavior.

Some of it anyway.

So, I was pretty damned surprised to learn many years later that the crying Indian belonged to a rather unusual tribe. He was Italian. ‘Iron Eyes Cody’ was born Espera Oscar de Corti. He had been playing Indian parts in the movies ever since the 1930s. Cody claimed Cherokee and Cree ancestry during much of that time, but this appears to have been a fabrication.

It’s tempting to think of Cody as an outright fraud, but that doesn’t begin to cover the facts of the matter. By all accounts, he seems to have actually lived the life he proclaimed. Cody married a native woman and adopted native children. He assumed a Native American identity on and off-screen, supported native causes, and essentially became the role he played in real life. Just what the process might have been in his own mind is something of an open question at this point, albeit one that most of us will never have an answer to. He is a rather successful example of a white Indian, a non-Indian who went native, so to speak.

One could well wish the ‘crying Indian’ had been a ‘real Indian’, and it’s hard not to feel a little betrayed to learn the truth of Cody’s ancestry, and yet he still remains a sympathetic figure. It’s tough to let him off the hook entirely for his self-presentation, but it’s also tough to be too hard on him for it. His story reminds me of an old line from Kurt Vonnegut’s book Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

By that standard I’d say Cody did pretty well in life.

***

The photo above was taken from Cody’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Cody has his own Snopes page of course, and the Wiki article on him isn’t bad. Findagrave also has a decent write-up. It’s interesting to note that these sources provide different times and dates for Cody’s birth, with the L.A. Times piece coming in as the outlier with 1916 and Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. The others tell us Cody was born in Louisiana, and in 1904. Cody also features prominently in the documentary, Reel Injun, which is definitely worth a watch.

Having spent most of my career working with Native Americans (and more recently, Alaska Natives), I’ve often had cause to reflect on the differences between the people I have met as an adult and the ideas circulating about them in the public imagination. Often I find myself thinking about notions of Indian-ness I learned when I was little. What were Indians to me as a child? And how did I arrive at those notions? I don’t know if there is any special insight to be gained here, but I seem to think with a keyboard, so anyway…

What do I remember?

***

Beulah, CO

I certainly remember cowboys and Indians on the playground in a small school in Southern Colorado. That and army were all I wanted to play (or tackle football – at least until it dawned on me that I sucked at sports). I remember that playing the Indian was somewhat of a social obligation on our playground, because they had to die more than the cowboys; it was expected. You had to take your turn out there storming the monkey bars which served as a fortress from which the playground cowboys picked off playground Indians with relative ease. As I didn’t mind dying on the playground, I did this more than most of my classmates, except for Joe, (I think that was his name). Joe claimed some Arapaho ancestry. He was happy to play an Indian. I don’t remember whether died more than the cowboys, but I sort of hope he didn’t.

A part of me suspects Joe eventually found something else to do on the playground.

Monkey Bars

I must admit that I got frustrated, because certain folks (like …ahem, Scotty and Paul) never seemed to take their turn as an Indian, and they never, NEVER, died when you shot them with an arrow, not even when you snuck-up close on them and got ’em right in the heart.

Cheaters!

***

I recall a number of class projects. Whether it was kindergarten or first grade, I can’t say, but some teacher had us all dress up as Indians once. This meant cutting holes into brown sacks for us to stick our heads and arms through, then cutting up the bottom for fringe. Mostly, I remember the dull scissors that we used to cut through the sacks, and the terrible blister I ended up with between my thumb and index finger.

I was not a huge fan of Indian dress after that assignment.

***

The wampum beads (colored macaroni on a string) went over much better. We wore them as necklaces. I and my classmates were more than happy to play Indian on the playground for awhile after making those. Naturally, we were plains Indians (pasta wampum having a slightly different regional presence than it’s namesake), but well, the important thing is that we fell when the cowboys shot us. That expectation was written in stone. I mean they could miss a time or two, but eventually you had to give it to the cowboy, grab your chest and fall.

Pasta wampum doesn’t hold up well when you fall on it.

***

I remember a trip to Yellowstone National park netted me a headdress, a toy bow and some picture-books filled with spectacular images of plains Indians. I think I played Indian that night until my parents wanted to shoot me for real.

As a side note, I recall that when my classmates started getting guns for Christmas (this was rural Colorado), and I started hinting, Mom and Dad responded to this by getting me a real bow. As if I couldn’t have killed myself with that. …Or for that matter Lawrence what’s-his-name from 6th grade. (In my defense, it was his idea to sit on the fence below and watch as the arrow fell back to earth; it saved time retrieving the thing.)

I still cringe when I think about that one.

***

I remember once while still living in Colorado, the class had to make models of different types of Indian homes. Somehow I got stuck with Navajo. Some friends are gonna kill me for saying that (and well they should) but that was exactly how I felt about it at the time. The ‘real Indians’ as far as I was concerned lived in teepees; I was stuck representing a hogan. At the time, ‘real Indian’ meant for me something like the plains Indians I had seen on TV so many times, usually charging over the hill to be shot down by the cowboys.

My hogans eventually took the form of an egg-shaped panty-hose container covered in something to make it look like mud; two of them of course. (Yes, the container was my Mother’s suggestion.) I wasn’t anymore pleased to have anything to do with panty-hose than I was to be making the homes of a tribe that didn’t appear in any of the movies I had been watching. (Little did I know where so many of the John Wayne films were made, …or how many Navajos I had already seen on film. I certainly didn’t know to call them Diné, nor did I appreciate the fact that I was setting their architecture back a couple hundred years with this mud-covered L’Eggs-model.) The bottom half of the shell seemed about right, but the top shell was way too pointed.

And my classmates made such perfect teepees, too!

I really hated that project.

***

Several years on down the road, another teacher gave out the same assignment, and somehow I ended up with Pueblos this time. I was a little older and a little less disappointed. …a little. I ended up with a gigantic sugar cube structure that didn’t look too bad until we covered it in brown wood-stain. Truth be told, it looked more like a castle than a Pueblo, but I still counted this as an improvement over my panty-hose hogan from previous years. After getting it back from the teacher, this structure made a really nice fort, one which helped to protect many a plastic army soldier from sundry enemies. What WW II-type army soldiers were doing in a castle-pueblo-fortress, I don’t know, but they fought well, let me tell you.

…at least until one of our cats used the box I had put this in as a substitute litter box.

***

I had a sister-in-law for a little while. She was “part native,” as they say. I remember, she had a lot of siblings, and I recall studying them quite carefully to see which ones looked like Indians and which didn’t. I figured you could see the Indian in about half of her siblings, but the other half looked white to me.

Naturally, I was quite confused.

***

I do believe it was my sister-in-law that caught me talking about ‘bad Indians’ one day and schooled me on the subject right quick. This had a pretty strong impact, not the least of reasons being that I liked all the Indians I knew. I liked Joey, I liked my sister-in-law, and as I recall I had a major puppy-crush on one of her little sisters, …possibly two. So, when she told me that Indians weren’t all bad, I was quite willing to believer her.

But that left me with one big problem; how to square this new understanding with all those westerns?

It all came to a head one day as I was looking down at a book illustration. The image is still quite clear in my mind; it depicted a whole bunch of plains Indians mounted on horse-back and charging toward the viewer looking fierce and warlike. Some adult in the household (I believe a guest) asked me what kind of Indians I thought they were. And that created quite a dilemma for me. I still didn’t know one tribe from another, much less how artificial those categories could be. More importantly, I was still stuck on the good Indian/bad Indian thing.

I stared at the image in silence for awhile, and I reasoned to myself that if not all Indians were bad, surely some were. There were bad cowboys and good cowboys in the movies, so why not good Indians and bad Indians? And maybe those bad Indians were the ones I had seen in all the movies. Maybe those were the Indians we had been playing as we stormed the monkey-bar fortress at recess. And if there were bad Indians, I thought, surely these guys (fierce looking as they were) must belong to that group! So, that’s what I said, my tone rising as I spoke; “…bad Indians?” after a bit of a pause, whoever it was offered that perhaps they were Comanche.

Total victory!

Frank C. McCarthy – The Hostiles

As far as I understood it, my theory that there were in fact bad Indians had just been confirmed, and I had just been given a name for at least some of them, Comanche! Comanche were the bad Indians. My sister-in-law and her family and Joey must have been the good ones. The next time I took off after that monkey-bar fortress, I feel quite certain that I counted myself as a ‘Comanche’ rather than a mere ‘Indian’.

Of course someone shot me and I had to fall down dead.

***

Naturally, my perspective on things having to do with Native Americans has changed over the years, not the least of them being my vocabulary preferences. But I often wonder how much of it is due to simply growing up and how much may be due to specific paths I have taken over the years? Most importantly, I find myself wondering how many of the ideas which shaped what an ‘Indian’ was to a little white guy living in Southern Colorado in the 1970s might have been due to the times I lived in? And how much that in itself may have changed?

I guess another way of putting it would be; do Indians still fight cowboys on the playground?

And if so, do the Indians ever win?

***

Many years had passed since all those stories mentioned above when I arrived in Navajo country to receive my first lesson on indigenous perspectives from a native source. My new landlord hadn’t quite cleared out of his place yet, but he had made a fold-out bed available for me. Observing a pile of pillows and blankets arranged in a familiar manner about the bed, I mentioned that his son had built a fort out of it.

A very irritated preschool child quickly emerged from beneath the bed to tell me it was not a fortress.

It had been a very long drive into work that week, not the least of reasons being a heavy snow storm that descended upon the central Navajo Nation just as I got into the area. I didn’t expect to see my landlady in the office, but there she was. She and I normally passed each other going both ways of our weekly commutes, and upon seeing her I assumed she had been trapped in town by the snowstorm. Would I be on the floor that night? …or asleep in the office? Not to worry, my landlady and her 4-wheel drive were on the way out of town, but she wanted me to know that I would have company that night after all.

I cocked an eyebrow and waited to learn more.

It turns out she had picked up a guy on the side of the road near Chinle. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a bilagáana (a white guy) and he had come out to the reservation looking for native wisdom. She had blessed him with his first taste of that wisdom by getting him in out of the cold. She added that she thought he was sick. So, I taught my class that evening and headed over to the house wondering what (or rather whom) I would find.

I’ve long since forgotten the man’s name, but he was indeed sick. A doctor had apparently told my guest that his Prostate Cancer could not be treated. So, he had come to Navajo country in the hopes that a Medicine Man could accomplish something that modern science could not. My guest didn’t elaborate much on his condition, though his frequent trips to the bathroom might have testified in some sense to the diagnosis. He was French, as I recall. I don’t think he ate at all that night, nor did he accept an invitation to breakfast.

The house contained two quite decent beds, but no central heating. So, my guest slept on the floor that night and I slept on the couch, thus putting us both near the coal-burning stove. In the morning, he pulled out his tarot cards and tried to get a sense of what the day had in store for him. The man offered to do a reading for me, but I declined. It had been a long time since I had left that sort of thing behind, and I didn’t want it back in my life, not even as a sort of social experiment. Instead, the man explained what each card meant as he drew it during his own reading. There was some good and some bad, and as one might expect, a lot of wiggle room on the particulars.

Although I asked, the man never really told me whether or not he was looking for someone in particular. I suspect he thought the practical problem of finding a Medicine Man willing to help him would resolve itself, perhaps with the aid of his cards or some comparable means of divination.

I don’t think my guest ever asked me for anything, nor did he accept anything I offered. The storm had broken late that evening, and his reading had been promising. So, the man opened the door to find a truly beautiful morning. Soon, he was on his way.

***

It is hard to explain just how out-of-place my guest for the evening had been. The man would have had far more luck turning south and heading into Sedona. Perhaps one of the more shady medicine-men would have sold him a quick Blessing-Way, but the real thing, so to speak, is a family affair. It would take friends and relatives to put together the resources, to aid in the ceremonies, and to help in the long rites. The proper healing from a local perspective might have taken several nights on end with several participants needed to make all this work. The logic of the system is as much social as it is metaphysical. Repayment for all of this effort would take the form of similar service when those same people needed help in various forms over the course of their lives.

This man didn’t really fit into the scenario he was trying to bring about. It wasn’t just the clumsy eclecticism of tarot cards and native healers that seemed off to me. On a much more profound level, my guest had come seeking a personal experience; its social implications were simply beyond him. With enough goodwill, folks could of course devise a work-around, but how likely was it that anyone would give him the chance? To say nothing of the odds that any of it would work!

Who knows?

I could easily hope that my guest for that evening found what he was looking for and flourishes today, living evidence that my sense of both metaphysics and indigenous culture are dead wrong on all counts.

It was desperation, not malice, that brought this man to Navajo country, and yet his failure to appreciate the social setting was part of a much larger problem. I often wonder just what is it about other people’s rituals and beliefs that makes them so attractive to those on a spiritual quest, even with personal health hanging in the balance? Among other things, this question always comes to mind when I think of that particular night in Chinle. Once that question takes hold of my thoughts, I cannot help but to want to follow it down a few similar paths.

***

I’m not altogether unfamiliar with the sort of thinking my guest brought with him that night. I remember reading about the ascended spiritual masters (Kuthumi, Maitreya, St. Germaine, etc.) in my grandmother’s old Theosophy books. The masters dwelt on this earth, at least when they wanted to, or so I read. The home of the masters, so the story goes, rested in the remotest parts of Tibet. I suppose that when the books had been written, this seemed an adequate explanation for the seeming impossibility of finding the masters by normal means. It took meditation to bridge the distance.

I remember sitting in on a séance as a child in the early 70s, one in which I and several family members received the names of our spirit guides. I remember the name of my “Indian guide.” It was “White Thumb.” With the name of “Wee One,” my “Joy Guide” also seemed to bring to mind an Indian, albeit a little one, perhaps an invisible playmate, …very useful to a kid living on a ranch inconveniently far from my classmates. I wasn’t half as interested in any of my other guides as I was in these two.

I also remember that the name of my father’s Indian guide had been of the South Asian variety. I cringe at the explanation, …this was a higher form of Indian guide, so he was told. I cringed again many years later when a family friend dismissed questions about the authenticity of sweat baths run by non-Indian practitioners. She assured me that she and her spiritual mentors were engaged in practices far more advanced than anything Native Americans had actually done. And of course I thought about all of this when I learned about the tragedy of a sweat bath lead by James Arther Ray. I wonder if he too was engaged in practices far more advanced than those of the Indian peoples from whom he borrowed piecemeal?

I remember a woman at a Native American Studies conference who once asked me if I was following the “Red Road,” a question so loaded with cultural baggage I couldn’t begin to unpack it in time to give an adequate response. I expect the woman must have found me quite a disappointment.

But Spiritual appropriation isn’t just limited to Native American traditions. I recall with great pleasure reading Karma Cola long before I headed out to the rez. Gita Mehta’s brutal observations on the antics of spiritual tourists in India touch upon issues quite familiar to those observing how Native traditions fare in New Age circles. Many of the characters she describes in Karma Cola appear quite as hapless as my guest sitting there reading tarot cards on his way to find a Medicine Man. Few seem quite so innocent or nearly as sympathetic.

Mehta has been rightly criticized for focusing on the negatives. So many claim to have found something of value in Eastern traditions. What personal pettiness it must take to deny or to minimize this! And yet the specter of people on a personal quest, proceeding oblivious to the social context in which they operate rings true for me. Whatever folks may have found in these strange, foreign, traditions, it seems a safe bet to suggest that they commonly miss much more.

What bothers me most is that the part spiritual tourists miss may well be the most important piece of the story, the part which anchors all that spiritual talk to an established community. I cannot help but wonder if the quest to learn someone else’s spirituality isn’t rather commonly an effort to escape that very thing!

Those traveling (literally or metaphorically) through another people universe are freed from much of the social context in which the symbols and ideas they seek to learn acquire meaning. They can learn how to perform a ritual, or even what it’s iconography means in some idealized sense, but they are freed from the tedium by which that ritual is connected to countless aspects of daily existence. Most importantly, spiritual tourists are free to fill in the gaps of their understanding as they see fit, unencumbered by multiple sources of information, some of which will surely disagree. What spiritual tourists acquire is a radically simplified version of some other world view, all the easier to tweak it to their own tastes. Perhaps some people need this; perhaps some even do great things with the opportunity. Either way, the point stands. Something highly important is lost in translation.

For some at least, the chance to strip a practice of its social context and rebuild it as they see fit is precisely the pay-off for embarking on a trip into unknown spiritual territory. There may be good reasons for doing that, but how often do people even realize that is what they are doing?

More to the point at hand, the term seems to be an awfully bad fit for a lot of the things it is commonly used to describe.

When I was teaching on the Navajo Nation, I used to illustrate this by asking my students; when you hold a healing ceremony, who comes? The answer was always something to the effect of the community itself, friends, relatives, etc. What happens if you don’t believe in the effectiveness of the ceremony? Frankly, I don’t think the question came up very often, at least not in the context of deciding who belonged at the ceremony, but I did once meet a woman who had effectively answered it. A born again Christian, she stayed at the main house during the chants and entered the Hogan to help serve food during the breaks. She thus met her family obligations without implicating herself in a ceremony that was anathema to her own beliefs.

When I asked my students who goes to a church, the answer was invariably something along the lines of its members, believers, etc. Catholics go to a Catholic Church, Baptists to a Baptist Church, and so on. Of course this doesn’t mean that others aren’t welcome at a given church, but there is a distinct sense that the church exists for those that adhere to its doctrines. Those testing the waters will be expected to make a choice at some time.

Which brings me to another point, a religion can be modeled as a debate stance. Who belongs to a church? In many cases, we can literally trot out a range of statements and ask people whether or not they will vouch for the truth of those claims. “God Exists.” “Jesus rose from the dead.” You get the idea. Say ‘yes’ to the right statements, affirm one’s beliefs that they are true, and you are in the club. Say no, and you are out. Whatever else is happening here, it is a process of segregating folks according to an imagined argument within a larger community.

Sandpainting

When I used to post on christianforums.com (CF), this was explicit policy for many years. Those who affirmed the Nicene Creed (or perhaps the Apostle’s Creed) could count themselves as Christian and post in the Christians-only sections. Those of us who could not were asked to restrict our posts to the open-debate areas. The policy varied in its details from time to time, and as I recall it changed rather dramatically a few years back, but when I was there at least CF policy fits the model I am proposing, membership in the faith, as it was defined on CF could be determined by one’s willingness to back a series of truth-claims.

So, what is the difference?

I’m about to paint it in pretty broad strokes, but I’ll warrant the paint gets more or less within the proper lines.

A religion is defined in terms of beliefs which consist of the willingness to vouch for the truth of a claim. A native ceremonial system is defined in terms of community membership and participation. Of course there is considerable overlap between the two. People expressed a number of beliefs connected with Navajo ceremonies, and churches can be remarkable community institutions. But as with any other questions of value, it is the priorities that count. Failure to vouch for essential doctrine gets you out of a church. It doesn’t get you out of a Navajo ceremony, at least it didn’t when I was there.

So, what is going on here? I would suggest, the point of the ceremony is at least partly to unite the community, to get them all involved in something of great importance to the community at large (the health of its members in the Navajo case). What is the point of the religion? Well it is at least partly to distinguish a select membership from some larger community. A religion isn’t simply about what group you belong to; it is about what separates you from those others. What a native ceremonial system unites, a religion divides.

Some might find that shocking, or at least counter-intuitive. Often when religious debates get rather heated, someone will lament the divisiveness of the issue and give a variant of the “can’t we all just get along” speech. The sentiments are noble enough, but I often wonder how many times people can see the process of division before it sinks in; that is what is SUPPOSED to happen.

Rainbow Bridge (Sacred Site)

Of course both ceremonial systems and religions unite as well as divide, but they do so on different parameters. The ceremonial system unites people along the lines of an established community, it gives people who share in a range of political and economic interactions a means of emphasizing their connections. A religion carves off a notch of those people and sets them in ideological opposition to others in their community.

So, this is my particular take on a running theme in Native American studies, the unfitness of “religion” to the understanding of Native American practices commonly described using precisely that term. The problem was particularly critical to the workings of a Federal law passed in 1978, The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which I happened to study for a bit. The law had a rocky history from the start, and at least in the early 90s (when I studied the matter) an awful lot of people were disappointed in its application to real life.

It was easy enough to say that various indigenous practices raised a lot of First Amendment issues. (Well at least it was in 1978; the prior history of willful abuse is dismal, and a topic for another post.) But actually extending Free Exercise protections to Native American “religious” practices proved very difficult. How do you protect the right to prayer when that might mean a lot more than a moment of silence or even a few words spoken in a certain posture? What do you do about ritual paraphernalia at border crossings? How about odd dress in schools or prisons? How do you deal with strange substances? Nevermind peyote; a simple smudge-pot can really screw up a paradigm! …and (this was the real sticking point) what do you do about access to sacred sites on public lands, especially sites that might not be so sacred anymore if someone builds a road or a fast food restaurant in the vicinity?

See, the problem was that native “religious” practices simply didn’t fit into the niche already carved out for religions within the American political economy. So, time and again, when Native Americans sought to enjoy their religious freedom, they found some official or judge who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) grant that protection. The necessary relief always seemed to be too much to ask, and the resulting case-law was dismal to say the least.

So, what was the problem? At least some folks figured it lay with the key term “religion.” It just didn’t fit. The practices in question may have included enough of what people call ‘religion’ to get the issue on the table, but they weren’t restricted to quite the semantic domain one normally expects of things described using that term. The contents Native American “religions” thus tended to spill over into other social terrain. Where western religions had learned to reside in the spaces between other public matters, their Native American analogs didn’t even come close.

So, if the term “religion” doesn’t fit, what does?

It really is difficult to answer that question. We can of course use the term “religion” anyway, but the warrant for its use is analogical, and my point is the analogy breaks down, often in really inconvenient ways. A common practice is to talk about native “spirituality,” but the chief benefits of “spirituality” seem to be that the term means just about anything you want it to mean, which is not an argument in its favor.

My own solution is to focus on the ceremonial practices. As the community-building functions of those ceremonies take priority over the argument-framing functions, those practices naturally stretch into social interactions well beyond those of religions. Of course this way of talking about the issue involves a judgement about priorities; it is a claim about what matters most. So, I won’t be too offended if someone opts to go another route.

Yes, I will. Let’s fight about it!

Anyway, what interests me about this is that it is the other half of a coin to my own situation when it comes to the subject. Religion obviously doesn’t do much for me, and as my last post ought to have established, I obviously think there is something about religion that is NOT part of my life and thinking. What that is, is another question, and admittedly a satirical post isn’t really going to nail it down. So, I am trying think my way through that issue (for the umpteenth time) by looking at people who may have a similar problem.

…and by “similar” I probably mean “opposite.”

If I as an atheist lack something falling under the heading of ‘religion’, the people I am talking about seem to have a surplus of it. Where the term denotes something I don’t want in my life, it denotes something that falls well short of what they want in their own lives. Where use of the word “religion” commits me to too much, it commits them to too little.

Either way, we have a problem.

***

The Hogan picture comes from the website, Virtual Tourist. It is part of the Navajo Museum and Visitor’s center in Window Rock, AZ. The sandpainting is from navajopeople.org which includes a nice description of its symbolism and ritual significance. The picture of Rainbow Bridge comes from Destination360. It was the subject of sacred site litigation in Badoni v. Higginson, one of many sacred sites litigated in the 70s and 80s.

We need a guide to help us through this next installment of Ten Little White Indians. for that purpose, we will turn to PATHFINDER: THE LEGEND OF THE GHOST WARRIOR (2007). Our main character is the sole survivor of a Viking expedition to Vinland sometime before the Columbian exchange. He is discovered as a young boy of about 12 following a battle with the hated dragon warriors (as the vikings are known in the movie). The Wampanoag who take out hero in call him ‘Ghost’, in an obvious reference to his pale skin.

Some years later, we find Ghost (played by Karl Urban) struggling for acceptance and pining for the daughter (‘Starfire’ played by Moon Bloodgood) of a nearby chief called ‘Pathfinder’ (played by Russell Means, yes THAT Russell Means). It is worth noting that Ghost retains possession of a sword from his old father, and he practices with it regularly.

Enter a new band of Vikings, and the plot begins to thicken. They soon slaughter Ghost’s adopted people and upon capturing him, subject Ghost to a duel. See now that is why you needed to know about the whole sword thing, because Ghost acquits himself surprisingly well in the fight. After taking an eye from his opponent, Ghost manages to escape by sledding down the mountain on a shield. He then hides for a while before heading to Pathfinder’s village to warn the of the coming danger.

Let us fast-forward a bit. In time the Vikings kill Pathfinder (who later appears as a vision of sorts at a key moment in the story). They capture Starfire and force Ghost to help them find the other village, but our hero tricks them and ultimately defeats their leader, Gunnar, leaving him mortally wounded and dangling from the edge of a cliff. Gunnar begs Ghost to grant him an honorable death. Knowing that Ghost is himself of Viking descent, he explains that death by the sword is the only honorable end for their kind.

Big mistake!

Ghost promptly disavows his viking kindred and sends Gunnar down the cliff instead. Do I need to mention that he gets the girl in the end?

Full on Pocahontas-meme for the win!

***

Black Robe

So, let’s stay in the whole Northeastern part of America for a while and fast forward some more, all the way to the 1630s. Made in 1991, this next movie follows the story of a Jesuit Priest, Father LaForge, or ‘BLACK ROBE‘ as his native companions refer to him. LaForge (played by Lothaire Bluteau) sets out on a mission to the Hurons, but of course this story isn’t really about his interaction with the Hurons. No, it is about his travels with the Algonquans who have agreed to take him up the St. Lawrence River to the Huron mission. He is further accompanied by one other Frenchmen, Daniel (played by Aden Young).

Daniel is the white Indian in this story.

Daniel and LaForge will be escorted to the Huron missions by Chomina (played by August Shellenberg). his wife (played by Tantoo Cardinal), and their daughter Annuka (played by Sandrine Holt) as well as a small band of relations. They have agreed to take LaForge to the Huron Mission in exchange for a number of trade goods (knives, axes, and such). The journey will take them through dangerous territory well away from their normal hunting grounds, a fact which displeases a number of traveling companions, and eats away at the morale of the party.

Did you notice that Chomina has a daughter?

Annuka (Holt)

Father laForge is definitely not a white Indian. He is here to change people, not to be changed by them. LaForge makes little effort to learn the customs of his companions. He knows their language of course, but he is never quite comfortable with it, and that is his strong suit. In all other respects, he finds nearly every aspect of life among the Algonquans awkward at best, but more often painful and terrifying. This makes the presence of Daniel all the more comforting, because the young Daniel takes to life among their new companions like a fish to water. He masters their language, and learns their customs readily. He is a blessing to LaForge on this long and strenuous journey.

Oh wait a minute, no he isn’t!

I’m sorry, what I mean to say is that Daniel WOULD have been a comfort to LaForge were it not for all those facts I just mentioned, …and the fact that Daniel scores up a relationship with Annuka early in the trip. Daniel’s ability to immerse himself in Algonquin culture serves only to intensify LaForge’s loneliness. Because of course if there is anything worse than being alone it is being abandoned, which is exactly how Father LaForge feels watching Daniel carry on with Annuka and move easily among the people with whom they are traveling.

LaForge feels even more alienated when Daniel actually does abandon him. faced with increasing doubts about LaForge’s character, the dangers ahead, and the wisdom of bypassing better hunting grounds, the entire band convinces Chomina to leave Black Robe behind. So, they present Daniel and LaForge with a duck as a farewell gift. There is a brief tense moment where it is unclear what the two of them will do to survive. Daniel quickly resolves this dilemma by taking off after Chomina’s band (and more importantly Annuka), leaving Black Robe alone in the forest with a dead duck. To say that his chances are slim is putting it mildly.

Don’t worry though, Chomina has a change of heart and returns along with a portion of his traveling party, and of course, Daniel. He announces his decision with the words; “I may be stupid, but I promised Champlain I would take the Black Robe to the mission.” Those who evidently thought him stupid exist stage left and make no further appearances in the story.

But Chomina and company, at least do return for black Robe.

Happy ending?

Not a chance.

An Iroquois war party quickly pairs the whole party down to the central characters (LaForge, Chomina, Annuka, Daniel, and one other child). Subjected to torture, the survivors escape (minus the child), though Chomina soon dies of his wounds. In the end, LaForge travels on to the mission while Annuka and Daniel head off into the wilderness.

So, this time the white Indian gets the girl, but the girl loses her whole family in the process. Good fun eh?

***

By the Way, I am skipping a really interesting theme about a prophetic dream and the symbolism of death. Want to know more about it? You know what to do.

***

Chingachgook (Means)

Speaking of Russell Means, he plays a key part in this next story too. Better yet, he carries a really cool weapon, a club-shaped a bit like a rifle-stock, throughout the movie. As I recall, Means maintains that these clubs are actually nutcrackers played up for purposes of Hollywood movies and white fantasies. …but I’m off on a tangent, the point of departure for which is well on down the road. …I just like cool clubs.

Anyway, let’s talk about the LAST OF MOHICANS (1992), a big screen adaptation of the famous novel by James Fennimore Cooper. This film depicts the struggles of Hawkeye (played by Daniel Day Lewis) during the early days of the French and Indian War. Hawkeye is our white Indian. Adopted by a Mohican leader, Chingachgook (Russell Means), Hawkeye’s mastery of Indian customs and hunting techniques is established early in the movie as he hunts with his adopted father and brother, Uncus (played by Eric Schweig).

Last of Mohicans

But let’s skip for a moment to the villain of this story, Magua (played by Wes Studi), or as I like to call him, “the true hero of this terrible tragedy.” You see Magua enters the story as a native scout for British forces on the colonial frontier. He agrees to escort Major Duncan Heyward and two women, Cora and Alice Munro (played by Madaleine Stow and Jodhi May). They are the daughters of Colonel Edmund Monro (played by …oh, who cares?) on a trip to Fort William Henry.

Magua betrays the expedition, leading a Huron attack (which results in the slaughter of countless British soldiers). And with that, the principle villain of the movie is just getting started. He later cuts the heart out of Colonel Monro, but not before promising to kill both of his daughters, thus erasing Monro’s seed from the earth itself. How’s that for a villainous plan?

You see it turns out that Magua’s own village had once been attacked by Moro’s troops, resulting in the deaths of his own children and the capture of his wife.

Did I mention that Magua kicks ass?

Magua (Studi)

Okay, well I suppose we are meant to be rooting for Hawkeye and his adopted family as they rescue Duncan Heyward and the girls during the battle that results from Magua’s most excellent betrayal. When the British and the French make peace, at least for the interim, Magua presses his personal war against the Monro clan by leading an attack on retreating British forces. He and his Huron warriors eventually captures Duncan and the two girls, but his Monrocidal goals are frustrated when Hawkeye arrives to negotiate a deal with the village leader. Cora is to be burned alive, Alice is to be made Magua’s wife (a decision he appears to accept). Hawkeye asks to take Cora’s place, but Duncan tricks the Huron into taking him instead, thus letting Hawkeye and Cora (who are by now a budding love interest) escape to live happily ever after.

…well, except they just can’t let Duncan die like that.

Hawkeye proves his name fitting by shooting Duncan from the edge of the village just before the flames overtake him and then flees with Cora. Magua follows with a number of warriors. Inexplicably they bring Alice along for the chase. In an effort to get Alice, Uncas then proceeds to fight his way through a number of Huron warriors walking single file along a majestic cliff-side. Unfortunately, Uncas proves no match for Magua, and his body soon goes over the cliff-side. Facing Magua’s outstretched hand, Alice instead jumps to her own death.

That’s when Chingachgook steps in and goes head-to-head with Magua making very short work of the villain. This time, it is Magua’s lifeless body that hits the ground.

The movie ends with a final prayer by Chingachgook, who now proclaims himself the last of the Mohicans.

Cora (Stowe)

And Once Again, the white Indian gets the girl, …who has lost her entire family in the process.

It is time for another trip through the world of the white Indian. In today’s installment we will meet three very different white Indians with three very different stories and three very different fates.

A Man Called Horse

Let us begin this installment with the quintessential white Indian of the 1970s. In A MAN CALLED HORSE (1970), Richard Harris plays an Englishman named John Morgan. Captured by a Sioux-speaking tribe known as the Yellow Hand, he is humiliated and used as a horse (hence the name). But Morgan proves himself an able warrior, and quickly gains the respect of his captors. More than that, he becomes a war chief, leading them to victory against the Shoshone.

The movie seems to take its portrayal of Native American culture quite seriously, perhaps a little too seriously. The film wants desperately to show us how things really were, but its portrayal is far too filled with sensationalism to provide any real insight into anything Native American customs. In fact, of all the white Indians of movie history, this one seems to irk people the most.

Initiation

In the most striking scene of the movie, Morgan is initiated into the Yellow Hand by means of a sun-vow. His chest is pierced, talons are fastened to the wounds, and he is suspended from the top of a Medicine Lodge. Upon waking, Morgan will soon make-love to the daughter of the chief (thus playing out yet another cliché – Pocahontas anybody?).

Loosely based on a Mandan variant of the Sun Dance ceremony, this scene was sufficiently close to home that many found its portrayal on the big screen quite offensive. In A man Called Horse, the logic of the ritual does less to tell us about the lives of the people with whom Morgan is living than it does to signal his great triumph, his transition from a mere beast of burden to a full member of the community (…one who is eligible to make love to the beautiful Indian princess. …yes, I said ‘princess,’ …and yes, I know how ridiculous that is.)

But wait!

Seriously, wait!

Return of a Man Called Horse

We must also account for THE RETURN OF A MAN CALLED HORSE (1976). Yes, that’s right. This movie has a sequel (two of them in fact, but I will spare you an account of the third; it isn’t even interesting in a disgusting way). In The Return of a Man Called Horse we find Morgan back at home in England, …and hating it. Surrounded by artifacts of his time among the Sioux, Morgan longs to rejoin the Yellow Hand.

When Morgan does return to his adopted people, he quickly discovers that they have fallen on hard times. Under attack from white trappers with Indian allies of their own, the Yellow hand are in sore need of great leadership. Luckily, Morgan is there to aid them. With their very own great white Indian now back among them, Morgan’s friends now find their courage. Naturally, the revival begins with a sun dance.

I have to confess that when I first saw these movies I enjoyed them a great deal. Mind you, I was a teenager. It took a few years before the arrogance of the message sunk in. Unable to fend for themselves, the Yellow Hand must have a white man come and rally them to perform one of the most sacred of their own ceremonies. That’s right; in this movie Lakota need a white guy to perform their own sacred rituals. I would say that it gets worse from there, but ‘pathetic’ is probably a better word for it.

***

Grey Owl

Back when I was teaching in Navajo country, one of my classes swore up and down that GREY OWL (1998) was a good movie. I went to a video store (yes kids, that’s how we used to do it) and looked at this, and looked at it some more, and …just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I mean Pierce Brosnan as an Indian? I just could not wrap my mind around it. But my dear reader, I realized as soon as I started this blog series that I would have to venture onto that dangerous terrain. And last night, I finally watched this movie.

Just for you.

Okay, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I really should have trusted my students. It was at least entertaining. I must give it that much.

This movie is about a real historical personage, Archie Grey Owl (1888-1938). When we first meet him, Grey Owl is entertaining tourists with Indian dances and serving as a hunting guide in the Canadian wilderness. His skills in trapping and hunting are unmatched, and his presentation of Indian customs comes across as both authentic and entertaining.

The Real Grey Owl

When Archie falls for a young Mohawk woman named Pony, his life begins to change dramatically. He gives up trapping after she adopts two beaver orphaned by his own traps and the tough old trapper finds himself unable to resist their charms. Facing ruin, Archie opts to write a book about the forests and the need for conservation. This becomes the first of many publications and speaking engagements. All seems to be going well.

…except that Grey Owl seems a little testy at times. He is nervous when told that newspaper reporters are looking to write stories about him, and inconsistencies begin to creep into his story. Why does he dye his hair? And was it his father that was Scottish and his mother Apache, or was it the reverse? Pressed on details, he becomes angry. No-one questions his adoption by a local Ojibwa community, but it becomes increasingly clear that something is wrong when Grey Owl reluctantly sets out for a 3 month tour of England. It is the chance of a lifetime. Why the hesitation?

We soon learn the answer.

While in England, amidst all the hoopla of a speaking tour which includes a performance for the King, Archie Grey Owl takes a small side-trip to a residential neighborhood he seems to know well. It turns out that he is actually Archibald Belaney, an Englishman himself. …a full-blooded Englishman, as it were, with no Apache relatives at all. Archie has a tense but pleasant meeting with the two aunts that raised him and takes a quick look in his old room where it immediately becomes apparent that his love of all things Indian had been well established as a young child.

When Archie returns home, he is invited to a great powwow where he is asked to meet with a gathering of chiefs. Only then does he confess his origins to Pony. Naturally, she forgives him.

Which leaves the gathering of chiefs…

Unable to back out of meeting them, Grey Owl enters the gathering of chiefs to a rather awkward and tense moment. Can he fool them? Well it turns out the answer is ‘no’. Everybody in the whole lodge laughs at Grey Owl’s deception. But all is not lost, and a Sioux chief finally explains; “Men become what they dream. You have dreamed well.”

And so the white Indian of this story receives the ultimate stamp of native approval. Even his fraudulence is blessed by the old Sioux chief.

***

White dawn

And then of course there are white Eskimos, even black ones. WHITE DAWN (1974) begins with a maritime disaster leaving a whaling crew stranded on the ice flows off Eastern Canada. Three survivors (Louis Gosset Jr. as ‘Portagee’, Timothy Bottoms as ‘Daggett’, and Warren Oates as ‘Billy’) will eventually be rescued by Inuit who take them in, nurture them, feed them, and accept them as part of the community.

One might expect people in such a position to show gratitude. Well they don’t, at least not all of them. Billy (Warrent Oates) is particularly contemptuous of his benefactors, insulting and exploiting them at every opportunity. Daggett (Timothy Bottoms) appears to accept his new community. In time, he has essentially gone native, or at least he tries to. If there is a definite white Indian in his story, it is Daggett. Portagee (Louis Gossett Jr.) seems content to follow the path of least resistance, and given Billy’s aggressiveness, that means Portagee will often serve as an accomplice in destructive activities. Daggett may mean well, but he simply does not put up enough of a fight to reign in his companions.

The generosity of the Inuit people plays a key role in this movie. Not only do the Inuit share their food and lodging with these desperate strangers, the men also share their wives. This allusion to yet another cliché (“Eskimo hospitality”) receives a lot of screen time in the movie. I would hardly suggest that the movie portrays the actual customs of spousal exchange accurately (it doesn’t), but for purposes of plot development it is perhaps more important to note that the three castaways misinterpret the custom as it is understood by the Inuit characters of the movie.

A Little Wrestling Match

The Inuit men of this movie share their wives as a gesture of hospitality; they do not mean to give their wives up. In time, Billy and Portagee come to see the women as theirs for the taking. For his own part, Daggett falls in love with a beautiful young wife of community elder (yes, there is that Pocahontas theme again). As the story unfolds, each of the three men becomes more presumptuous in their approach to the women of the community.

And I suppose I should say here that the movie does very little to shed any light on the motives of the women themselves for having sex with any of thee men. Daggett’s love interest appears responsive. The women are otherwise little more than pawns in a game that takes little notice of their own preferences.

Billy is the driving force for much of the movie’s action, initiating one after another disruptive scheme. He is greedy, malicious, and completely unprincipled. Most importantly, Billy convinces both Daggett and Portagee to steal the community stores of fish and set sail in a small native boat. When this attempt to get home ends in yet another crash, the Inuit will once again come to the rescue. And all three must now live with the community made hungry by their theft of food supplies.

When Billy’s shenanigans finally result in the accidental death of a young woman, the community takes action. Tricked into accepting mittens with no thumbs from the remaining young women of the village, Billy and Portagee are unable to defend themselves when attacked by the men of the village. There is a moment when it seems that Daggett will be spared, but that ends abruptly with an arrow to the belly.

And of course it is the death of Daggett which is most interesting here. He is the white Indian of the bunch. …or the white Eskimo as the case may be. It would be easy to think the Inuit had killed him unnecessarily. After all, he was a decent guy. Absent Billy and Portagee, one cannot help but to hope that Daggett would immerse himself in the community and live as they do. Who knows? perhaps he would even get the girl!

White Dawn

But of course that girl is why Daggett must die. Where Billy and Portagee use the Inuit women in the cheapest sense of the word, Daggett has claimed the love of another man’s wife. For all its sincerity, Daggett’s presumption reaches a scale well beyond that of his companions. He wants to keep the girl, but of course she is not his for the taking.

You ever notice how many movies about Indians are really movies about white people? More specifically, many stories about Indians are actually about white people who live among them. Such characters are often called “white Indians” in the literature. They are certainly a worthy subject in their own right, but Hollywood seems quite dependent on these characters in its treatment of Native American subjects. The white character provides a lens through which non-natives can observe native culture. It is a role that we can identify with, even as we are shown a world perhaps foreign to us (assuming the film actually does attempt to show us something about the lives of Native Americans, which is not always the case).

It’s an old cliché, often tiresome, and in some respects outright pernicious, but I must admit that a couple of these characters actually resonate for me. At other times, it tempts my lunch to return to the free air about me. At the very least, I think one ought to be clear about the subject matter. All too often these films about non-natives are pitched to the public as films about the lives and customs of Native Americans. Even if this is just a difference in emphasis, the emphasis is often highly significant.

So, let’s see a few examples, shall we?

***

Little Big Man

We shall begin with an old favorite of mine, LITTLE BIG MAN. This is the story of Jack Crabb, supposedly the sole white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. We meet jack in an old folks home as a man well over a hundred years old. Visited by an anthropologist, Jack is angered at the suggestion that was an old Indian fighter and proceeds to tell his life story with a tape recorder rolling.

It turns out that Jack had been adopted by Cheyenne (whom he refers to as “Human Beings” throughout the narrative) after his family was slaughtered by Pawnee. During the course of his life, Jack returns to white society for a time and experiences life as a religious youth, a con artist, a “gun fighter,” a drunkard, and even a mule skinner. But Jack returns to the Human Beings several times during the course of the movie, even taking a wife (eventually four) and living among them. Jack explains that he reckoned he would stay there and live among Human Beings for the rest of his life, right there on the Washita River.

And for those that know a little about the history of Indian-white relations, the appearance of Custer will be no surprise. For me at least, the scenes that follow are quite difficult to watch. It is in revenge for this attack, that Jack Crabb ultimately plots to lead Custer into a trap, tricking him as it were into attacking the Indian village at Little Bighorn.

Little Big man was the first major motion picture in decades to take an explicitly pro-Indian stance on the history of the west. It is almost too late to capture the full shock value of its portrayal. The movie and television audiences of the 1970s had seen many depictions of Indian savagery. To see the U.S. cavalry shooting women and children in cold blood was a straight-forward reversal of the prevailing expectations of the time.

More than that, Little Big Man is filled with vibrant Cheyenne characters, not least of them being Old Medicine Lodge (played by chief Dan George). The characters are even allowed to occupy social roles defined at least partly by Cheyenne cultural patterns. (We are for example introduced to a contrary and a hee-man-eh.) Crabb himself manages to occupy the role of the White Indian without crowding the Native American characters into the background. He is accepted among the Human Beings, not because he is a great warrior (not really, at any rate), but because he has a knack for survival. Crabb bumbles his way through life, understanding a lot about what goes on around him, but without ever really taking control of his own fate.

Chief Dan George

But what has always struck me as the true genius of this movie is that having done far more than normal for the times, it makes no real claims to historical accuracy. Jack Crabb is essentially telling us a tall tale, and his own biases provide the filter through which each event is portrayed. One gets the impression that Crabb’s story must approximate the actual truth (he simply knows too much to have made everything up), but if we believe him a number of the particulars, we have certainly gone well beyond the boundaries of fact when he takes credit for the slaughter of Custer.

But who could fault Crabb for stretching the truth. We can only love him for somehow surviving the real events of his life whatever they may have been, and for sharing a perspective on events which was at that time completely novel to the motion picture industry of that day.

***

Hombre

Did you know that Paul Newman once played an Apache? …well, sort of. In HOMBRE, Newman plays John Russell, a white man raised among the Apache. Old pictures of Apaches fill the screen during the opening credits, and soon we are treated to an image of Newman dressed as an Apache.

Hombre

Russel and two Apache companions have been earning a living by capturing wild horses to be sold to the stage-coach line. They learn that a railroad will soon replace the stage-coach line, and horses will no longer be needed.

Russell learns that he has inherited a boarding house from his original family. He returns to civilization and sells the house before heading back west aboard a stage-coach.

Newman in Hombre

When the stage-coach is robbed, it is Russell (with his superior survival instincts) who keeps the other passengers alive, their prejudice against him notwithstanding. In time, Russell learns that the robbers are after money meant for the San Carlos Apache reservation. It had been stolen by a fellow passenger. Russell’s treatment of his companions is harsh, bordering on cruel, which seems fitting enough given their own attitudes towards him. In the end, Russell will sacrifice himself to save a woman who would not share the stage-coach with him. He asks only that the money should be taken to the people for whom it was intended.

The movie ends with a vintage photograph. It contains the image of a white boy surrounded by Apache children of his own age.

***

Dance Me Outside

DANCE ME OUTSIDE: This movie is not on the whole about a white Indian. I include it in this list, because it has an absolutely wonderful scene which serves to comment on the whole phenomenon. For reasons which we need not get into here, the main characters, Silas crow and Frank Fencepost (both Anishinabe), are asked to keep Robert McVey, a white in-law, busy while his wife is off doing something important. Unable to think of anything else to do, and really unhappy about spending the night in his rather lame company, Silas and Frank decide to initiate him into the tribe. What follows is a hilariously improvised ceremony. The scene could easily have been painful to watch, but there is something about the way the white character embraces the ceremony which comes across as endearing. It is as though he has simply chosen to accept the ritual for whatever it is. The man commits so completely to the absurd little made-up ritual that his own sincerity (absurd as it is) seems to redeem the whole event. In the end, he earns a grudging respect from Silas and Frank, not for being a properly initiated member of the tribe, but for simply being human, foibles and all.

Silas and Frank

What I particularly like about this scene is the sense of compassion behind the treatment of this subject. This movie takes the piss out the old white Indian cliché as well as anyone has, but it does it without rancor. The white character is mocked, yes, but he is mocked with a gentle touch. Dance me outside is an obscure movie, and I must say that it has a kind of after-school special quality to it. Still it’s a wonderful tale well told.

***

That’s it for now. There will be two more volumes in this one.

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Okay, no I can’t let my readers off that easy. These movies are actually pretty good, so I’m afraid you haven’t got the full cringe-worthyness of this subject. So, let’s have a listen shall we?